Point Reyes Light - October 25, 2002

Organic farm wins praise; BPUD helps torment it

By Ivan Gale

While Bolinas farmer Warren Weber is receiving many accolades from the sustainable agriculture community, his Star Route Farms is under attack from people who also claim to be safeguarding the environment.

A fortnight ago, directors of Bolinas Public Utility District said they were concerned with Weber’s plans to lower a dike on land adjoining Bolinas Lagoon.

Converted Star Route

In the mid-80s, Weber converted one of two Star Route Farms parcels of land on the shore of Bolinas Lagoon from seasonal grazing to organic row-cropping.

After the US Corps of Army Engineers claimed that Weber had violated the Clean Water Act by piling fill onto existing dikes, the farmer agreed to lower his dikes and eliminate the problem. However, when Weber was granted an excavation permit for the dike project last month, the Tomales Bay Association appealed the decision.

At their meeting, BPUD directors agreed to send a letter to the county in support of the association’s appeal, which claims the dike project didn’t receive adequate environmental review. A hearing before the planning commission is scheduled for Nov. 18 to decide upon the association’s appeal.

Weber feels the controversy over the dikes isn’t what his opponents are after.

No objection to dikes

"They don’t have a real objection to taking dikes down," Weber said. "They have an objection to us being able to farm here." He added that the property has been in agriculture since the 19th century.

Diverting some water from Pine Gulch Creek to irrigate Star Route Farms crops were also raised concern among BPUD directors. The directors also approved sending a letter to the Community Development Agency. The letter neither condemned nor vehemently opposed the diversions. Instead BPUD wrote that it wanted the size of diversions, as well as the amount of flow in the creek.

Weber and two nearby farmers have long been diverting water from the creek for agricultural use. Recently, the three farmers have proposed to build holding ponds that would allow a small pump to slowly siphon water from the creek.

Currently the farms exercise their riparian water rights by using a larger pump that gives them a larger volume of water in a shorter time, causing a more reducing flows in Pine Gulch Creek more dramatically. The ponds would give the farmers the ability to a fair amount of water from the creek over time while affecting neither creek flows or fish habitat.

In its letter, BPUD did not oppose the ponds, but Weber said the handful of people fighting him reveal a "bizarre and cynical" brand of environmentalism.

"People don’t understand farmers do need to use resources. They need to take air and water and nutrients," he said. "That can’t be escaped."

International attention

Ironically, despite his problem with people he considers misguided zealots, Weber’s farm recently attracted a delegation of writers attending a UC Berkeley symposium on food and agriculture.

Among the notables in attendance at his pioneering farm were Eric Schlosser, author of the best-seller Fast Food Nation, and Michael Pollan, author of The New York Times feature This Steer’s Life. Both writers have became well known as a result of their writings about the large scale and scope of corporate agriculture in America.

Weber escorted the group of more than 30 journalists around some of his 40 acres under cultivation, where he grows a mix of more than two dozen salad greens as well as herbs and vegetables.

After the group toured Weber’s packing facilities and enjoying a taste of fresh lettuce hearts, Weber’s wife Amy distributed a tasting of pineapple-sage flowers. Later in the evening the group departed Bolinas for a dinner at Nan McEvoy’s olive-oil ranch on Red Hill. McEvoy, the former chairwoman of The Chronicle corporation’s board of directors, also is an organic farmer.

Organizing the tour was former Bolinas resident Orville Schell, dean of UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. Schell, who co-founded Niman-Schell meat ranch, said his decision to hold the gathering in Northern California and to visit West Marin was natural.

An old friend of Weber, Schell said, "Star Route Farm was one of the earliest to pioneer organic vegetables for commercial sale." Schell said that Northern California is "one of the epicenters of organic agriculture."

West Marin farms such as Star Route, Martinelli Farm, Straus Dairy, McEvoy Ranch, and Niman-Schell Ranch are models for organic farms that have modernized while producing high-quality food on a small-scale, family-oriented basis, Schell noted.

These farms "are both a model of the past and, one hopes, something of a model of the future," Schell told The Light.

A profitable enterprise

Mark Hertsgaard, a teaching fellow at the Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism and author of Earth Odyssey: In Search of Our Environmental Future, said journalists are writing more about organic foods because it’s now becoming profitable.

"It’s growing much faster than conventional farming sales, apparently because consumers want food that tastes like real food rather than tomatoes that are as hard as tennis balls – and have to be, to survive the long distances that industrially produced vegetables must travel between the farm and the kitchen table," Hertsgaard said.

"There’s no doubt that farmers elsewhere look to farms like Warren’s as a model, for the simple reason that the marketplace is sending signals that going organic is not just good for the soil and human health [by reducing pesticide use] but also for a farmer’s bottom line."

Writer Pollan was succinct in explaining his presence in Bolinas. "Organic farmers like Warren are more amenable to visits from journalists. Industrial agriculture is not at all hospitable to journalism these days. They know they don’t have a very good story to tell; Warren knows he does."

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